Tortie Tuesday: Samantha on the Care and Feeding of Sick Humans

Hello from Samantha! My human was not well this weekend. She felt feverish enough to try writing a post for me rather than writing a status update for herself.

She sat up with the computer as usual but she refused to come out and play, or pick up and stroke anybody, or bring anybody indoors (although it was damp and chilly on the porch).

She said "I owe people a long political post, five short guest posts, and a first chapter for a novel, the obligations having been incurred in that order, but first I have a fever to starve out."

She made a different sort of noises than usual: a lot of coughs, sneezes, sniffles, and growling at that little object humans talk to about “all the October yard work still to do and this weekend I have this stupid fever.”

The hot-air fan ran a lot. It wasn’t really cold. Other humans weren't cold. Only our human got any benefit from the hot-air fan, much as we cats wanted to use it to dry the damp out of our fur.

On weekends the human usually cooks something with chicken in it. We look forward to weekends all week while we eat our kibble. But this weekend our human did not cook at all.

“Do you want to go to the store?” said the object she holds up beside her head.

“I really ought to cash out that last Paypal payment,” said our human, “but cough! cough! COUGH cough cough...McDonald’s is so chilly and so crowded. I think I ought to starve the streppy-bugs before I go to the cafe on Tuesday.”

I looked. I did not see bugs, or beetles, or even ants in the office room where the human was coughing at the computer.

“Streppy-bugs are invisible,” said the human.

If she wants to play games, I suppose that is her business. Cats usually outgrow making up invisible enemies after we have kittens of our own. I don’t like baby humans so I suppose a little infantile game playing is the price of having a baby-free human.

“No, but they’re real,” said the human. “They are tiny real living creatures that float around on the air, and if you breathe them in, or lick them off your fur, they get down the back of your throat and bite. Mostly they bite babies. By the time they’re half grown most living creatures are immune to streppy-bugs, or streptococcal infections as doctors call them, but they can make adult humans cough if we are run-down, as it might be from seven or eight poisoning episodes in this neighborhood this summer. And once before your time, Samantha, I knew a cat called Iris—in your nicest moods you remind me of her—who had a streptococcal infection all winter long. She never completely recovered. She stopped growing.”

“Traveller and Serena and I all need to finish growing up,” I said. “Rub behind my ears, please.”

That's Serena sitting on top of my Safe Place, which she thinks is her Safe Place too, because she was born there. For a spring kitten, doesn't she look like a grown-up Queen Cat? The human says she's a carrier of a bad gene because she has a sturdy build and her tail is not so long that she has to carry it high or curled up all the time, as I do. Because she's Burr's daughter. 

The human also says she got her good sense from Burr's mother Irene. She says Irene never was much of a hunter or outdoorsman, but she had the good sense to stay home, hunt as the team member inside the house, and bring up everyone else's kittens even from outside the family. She says Irene was sometimes too sweet and gentle for her own good, and Serena is sometimes too rough and tough, but both of them were clever enough to understand words, behave well, and almost never annoy her. She says Traveller and I annoy her constantly because we show enthusiasm about food, but she likes us anyway. 

“Can’t you smell why I don’t want to pet you?” said the human. “Don’t I smell bad to you?”

She did, but humans always smell foul. Don’t take this personally. Other animals know you can’t help it. Your natural scent is nasty enough but then the things you add to it can be positively sickening. Traces of human scent on our fur interfere with our hunting.

This is why the cats you call feral don’t want to touch humans. It’s not that we’re afraid of you. Burr could slice the skin off a human in strips if he wanted to. It’s that even when we like you enough to put up with your odor, having your odor cling to us keeps us from catching enough prey animals to live on. House mice, like house cats, have made a decision to put up with human odor, but how many of them are there? To catch enough field mice and rabbits to get through the winter, Burr cannot afford to be fouled with human odor, even though he says the human is telling the truth about having stroked his back the morning he was born.

That's Burr, a few weeks after he was born. He's not let his picture be taken since but he still has the same patch of black on his head. He is a big, burly tomcat, maybe ten or twelve pounds, with a stub of a tail.

Well, Traveller and Serena and I have made our choice, and considering that we have to walk around with horrid human odor stuck to our fur, we think we ought at least to get some chicken on a weekend. But our human did smell worse than usual. Maybe she was too ill to go and find chicken. I’ve never seen her bring home a whole chicken, only parts. Old Heather used to reckon the computer has something to do with persuading a better hunter to give our human bits of chicken, but I don’t see how.

So Burr and I went out and found her a nice little fat vole. The kittens wanted to play with it while it was fresh and floppy. I said no. I would have dropped it right on the human’s foot if I could have got into the office room where she was coughing at the computer. Since I couldn’t do that I tucked the vole into her shoe. 

I've always heard that humans won’t eat voles, but considering how many other disgusting things they do eat, berries for pity’s sake, zucchini, onions, persimmons, and even oranges, and I’ve seen mine chew on a piece of plastic that smelled like mint!—I thought I’d at least offer her a vole. Somebody has to eat them, and humans certainly aren’t particular about the things they put in their mouths.

“It’s the thought that counts,” she said, throwing it off the porch. “Thank you, Samantha.”

Traveller naturally thinks we ought to lie around her and purr, but maybe the thought does count, because after receiving the vole she began to smell less horrible and run the hot-air fan less, although she was coughing more.

All day, all weekend, we all stayed on the porch and purred at her.

In case more thoughts might do her more good, Burr and I went out hunting again the next night, but we did not find another vole.

Product Review: Straw Propeller Moroccan Spice Oatmeal

Quick post for local people who want to know...I finally taste-tested the Moroccan Spice oatmeal at the www.robertsfamilybakerycafe.com . It tastes pretty good.

Here is the list of ingredients: oats, figs, almonds, sweetener "crystals" made of a mix of cane juice with molasses and honey, cinnamon, turmeric, nutmeg, mace, white pepper, galangal, black and green cardamom, ginger, anise, allspice, rose petals, and a grain of salt.

So what does this weird Moroccan spice mix actually taste like? Well, it's not quite the same as the basic mix of cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg in familiar "spice" desserts, but if you're not consciously looking for the exotic tastes of galangal and rose petals, it tastes similar to your basic cinnamon-ginger blend, or maybe five-spice blend, with a grain of salt and a fleck of pepper. Basically it tastes like sweet, nutty, figgy oatmeal.

Is it safe? Duh. I'm still having a celiac reaction to the last poisoning of the roadsides; it's not rained yet. I'm sick anyway. I can't imagine figs or honey being safe, even if the oats and almonds are, but I'm not sure how much difference that's going to make.

This morning I started to buy peanuts, again, and then I saw this "different" oatmeal that I'd wanted to try before, in the cafe again, and it occurred to me that nobody can live very long on peanuts alone and I'm not going to feel better before it rains in any case.

We need a total glyphosate ban. If our federal government is too corrupt to give us one, and is corrupt enough to make it hard for states, towns, and counties to ban this poison, we need to ban it ourselves, by any and all means necessary. Live on celiac-tested glyphosate-free food, which I realize means peanuts, until other food products rot on the shelves and farmers themselves take out TV ads showing how they've safely burned all glyphosate-tainted crops, in an enclosed furnace with a fresh thick filter on every vent, and are going 100% "pesticide"-free. Boycott stores that sell glyphosate, or anything else made by any company that makes it. Demand that existing supplies of glyphosate be used up in the only ethically tolerable way: pumping them into Bayer corporate executives locked in fully enclosed cells with TV cameras, so those who are really obsessed with "the science" can see whether tumors form before the guilty parties die of starvation.

Meanwhile, I lived dangerously. I ate a bowl of oatmeal.

You wouldn't spend $3.59 on one bowl of oatmeal at home, but if you're going to eat in a restaurant anyway, Moroccan Spice Oatmeal is not "too weird" or salty or yucky. And the chunks of almond are big enough to crunch, but being dried out and rehydrated makes them crunch easily, like peanuts, which is a nice touch for some.

If you decide you like just a hint of an exotic expensive spice, this book link is for you:

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/16

Dear Congressman Griffith...

It would be pleasant, Gentle Readers, if I could go online and do anything but wail about glyphosate. I really intended to do that this weekend. During the past week I ate a severely restricted diet, not a great deal of food altogether, and by Friday I was starting to feel better. Then, as noted below...a helpful friend made sure I had Internet access, so I knew why I've started gushing blood again. Then, online, helpful e-friends made sure I was notified that the Farm Bill being considered in the House of Representatives contains a ban on local glyphosate bans--I suppose somebody wanted to rack up a higher body count. These helpful e-friends supplied a form letter, but not a very good one. I wrote this letter to U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"
How are you today? I hope you're feeling better than I am. As discussed at length at https:// www. priscillaking. blogspot. com, I am a celiac, and although I've limited my diet to fewer than a dozen food products lately, yesterday I felt another bout with celiac sprue coming on. I wondered why. This morning I saw, once again, the scorched brown grass where glyphosate was sprayed along Route 23.

Glyphosate vapors make me sick in the same way eating wheat does, only moreso. Glyphosate vapors make many other White people and some non-White people sick in a similar way. In view of the number of people of Irish descent who react to this poison in our environment, I really think this repeated use of glyphosate amounts to an attempt at Irish Genocide.

You may have heard that there's controversy about the study, which NIH posted on NLM in 2013, showing how and why glyphosate makes celiacs sick and produces weirdly celiac-like reactions in some non-celiacs. That is incorrect. All controversy is about the extent to which the widely varying effects of glyphosate exposure contribute to cancer or other poorly understood conditions.

The dossier the corporations allowed to be presented to the EPA in their own defense, showing some room for doubt that glyphosate causes cancer, is the best attack on any effort to continue spraying this poison: It proves that glyphosate DOES harm people, sending exposed people to hospital emergency rooms with symptoms in one or more of eight distinct categories depending on individual genetic profile.  No animal study shows that glyphosate can be considered safe; what they show is that glyphosate does measurable harm to all animals, birds, insects, and even fish, but in a wide range of ways, again depending on the individual.

Whatever your reaction to glyphosate may be, and some people's are worse than celiac sprue, you are "an outlier" because "only a few" people have the identical reaction! Yet  the majority of all living things react badly to glyphosate exposure. Perhaps this weird chemical exists in order to teach us that big numbers don't matter. Any number of people injured or killed is too many.

You lost a good conservative constituent last summer. He was not a celiac and didn't believe his son's celiac-like symptoms, or my confirmed celiac symptoms, could have anything to do with his use of "pesticides." He didn't want to admit that he had a glyphosate reaction of narcolepsy, too, but he did--every time--and he died in that reaction, after another heavy spraying along Route 23.

Glyphosate residues in gluten-free food are disabling my mother, and ruining my nieces' and nephews' teen years. I had felt that only the celiac support group would understand this until I started spending more time in the town open-air market this year. Mr. Griffith, Gate City is as solid a community of loyal Republicans as you could hope for, and during these glyphosate exposures a good half of the population are *visibly* affected. Most of them try to believe that they suddenly became much "older," or more "allergic" to some harmless flower, than they were an hour ago, or that "something is going around"--but they are having glyphosate reactions.

We need to ban this kind of poisons, and we need a Farm Bill that FULLY SUPPORTS the right of every community to ban glyphosate.

I have documentation enough to fill at least two three-ring binders when printed. I have links to it, in six languages, on Twitter. Nothing can be gained by repeating the pain lazy fools have been allowed to inflict on me and my neighbors today. No person should have to go through more than one glyphosate reaction. We really need a nationwide ban but, failing that, we need a Farm Bill that respects local bans.

(I already get the E-Newsletter. I am not attached to the idea of getting a personal response--all I want is a Farm Bill that does not authorize lazy fools to kill me outright.)
"

Documents with links and testimony at this web site:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/10/nihs-big-mistake.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/10/dear-epa.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/10/dear-wal-mart.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/08/status-update-fifth-round-of-glyphosate.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/08/status-update-glyphosate-fourth-major.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/08/glyphosate-worse-and-worse.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/07/toxic-tomatoes-or-was-it-peppers.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/07/tim-kaine-on-regulating-toxic-chemicals.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/06/another-gmo-and-glyphosate-regulation.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/05/status-update-ill-wind-blows-nobody-any.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/05/dear-stanford-students-why-im-not-vegan.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/05/phenology-rant-enter-this-poisoned.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/02/congressional-hearings-on-monsanto-have.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/10/first-sick-day-in-nine-years.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/08/long-grim-phenology-post-jenny-wren.html
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2017/07/grim-phenology-post-more-glyphosate-in.html

Lots more is linked at Twitter:

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23GlyphosateAwareness&src=typd

That's my chat page, but it's not my content. It links to documents in English, French, Spanish, which I read, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, which are close enough to Spanish that I can figure out what people are writing about, and German and Turkish, which I can't read at all, which other Twits have explained for us. I can do rough translations between English, French, and Spanish only.

Linked on the Twitter page is a New York Times report about a retiring EPA employee who's vowed to get glyphosate banned, all the hammer-and-tongs in the French Parliament, all the reports about how glyphosate kills bees, much much more. I don't admit that glyphosate is the sole or whole cause of cancer, although it takes a fool to doubt that it's a contributing factor. I don't know to what extent glyphosate causes birth defects, which may or may not be the case in some countries not others. I do know beyond all reasonable doubt that glyphosate is making a lot of my Irish-American neighbors sick, that it killed one of Dad's cousins by what might be called euthanasia, that it's killing Mother by slow torture, that it's blighting some of The Nephews' youth--and we really need a total ban.

And if Congress won't give us even the local bans many towns and counties, and the state of California, have adopted, then I seriously think it's time to admit that we are under violent attack, and the use of force in self-defense is justified.

Before anyone does feel it necessary to yank the sprayers out of the lazy fools' hands and ram them down their throats, which I remind everyone would still contaminate the water supply--will every reader please write, and post if possible, your own letter to your own U.S. Representative.

Morgan Griffith's Good News

U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9) may still need further enlightenment about the evils of unchecked glyphosate spraying, but his news for his constituents is good:

"
Monday, October 22, 2018 –
Prescription Drug Costs
Previously, I reported in this column that two bills meant to combat high drug prices had passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate. I am happy to say that President Trump has since signed them into law.
The Know the Lowest Price Act of 2018 and the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act ban “gag clauses,” which are sometimes imposed by pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) on pharmacists and can lead to customers paying higher prices for prescription drugs.
These bills easily passed the House and the Senate, and President Trump voiced strong support for them as he signed them into law. These were the Senate versions of legislation I worked on in the Energy and Commerce Committee with a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Buddy Carter (R-GA), Debbie Dingell (D-MI), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Peter Welch (D-VT), Gene Green (D-TX), and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). They are bipartisan wins for transparency in drug pricing.
Good News for Manufacturing
America’s economic strength is often associated with manufacturing, and manufacturing jobs are often associated with well-paid, steady work.
Right now, manufacturing is enjoying a resurgence nationally and in the Ninth District.
At the national level, U.S. manufacturing capacity increased for the sixteenth straight month in September. Crucial policy changes, such as the rollback of excessive regulations both by Congress and by the Trump Administration and enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, are fueling this boom.
Prudent regulation and the cutting of excessive red tape allow those companies to devote more attention and resources to their businesses rather than complying with overly-prescriptive governmental dictates.
By making America’s tax code more competitive with the rest of the developed world, companies have more reasons to open or expand manufacturing operations in the United States.
Further, we changed the tax code to make it easier for American companies who profit overseas to bring those profits back to the United States for investment, wage increases, etc.
Wages are up. The American people are confident about their economy, and they are buying more goods, manufactured goods.
Better policies at the federal level encourage this manufacturing boom. We can share in this national manufacturing renaissance. Good economic news from the past months shows that we are in fact sharing in the growth.
The Roanoke Times highlighted that the Volvo plant in Dublin has added 300 new workers since the beginning of September and 900 new workers overall since the beginning of the year. As manufacturing swings upward, more trucks are needed to move goods, therefore increasing sales of big rigs like the ones produced in Dublin.
Other companies with established operations in the Ninth District are expanding, too. I have participated in these announcements. The paper and packaging company WestRock announced in September that it will be investing $248 million to upgrade its manufacturing operations in Covington and Alleghany County. WestRock’s choice to invest millions indicates a long-term commitment to its manufacturing operations in our area.
In Henry County, Monogram Foods also announced in September a $30 million expansion, which will lead to the creation of 300 new jobs. This is Monogram’s latest expansion in Henry County.
Not only are manufacturers with an existing presence here investing in and expanding their operations; companies have found our area ideal for establishing new operations. This happened in Henry County, where Press Glass, a flat glass manufacturer headquartered in Poland, will invest $43.55 million and create 212 jobs.
Press Glass saw what the other companies knew from their operations here. We have the workforce and the infrastructure a manufacturer needs to succeed.
As I visit businesses across the district, investments are being made and jobs are being created.
We also are working together at the local, state, and federal level to build on these assets for further growth. One example where this is occurring is Project Intersection in the City of Norton, a site being developed for future manufacturing operations. It is a product of regional cooperation through Norton and the Counties of Lee, Scott, Wise, and Dickenson. Federal contributions have included a $3.5 million grant through funding I secured in the Abandoned Mine Land reclamation program and $917,315 from the Appalachian Regional Commission.
Thanks to the individuals who took risks to start manufacturing goods in the United States, manufacturing helped build this country into a great economic power, and it provided many families with stable, well-paying jobs. Recent months show that by implementing better policies and leveraging the right assets, manufacturing can thrive once again, in Virginia and across the nation.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.
"

NIH's Big Mistake

1. Mononucleosis, a Personal Introduction for The Nephews, which may be skipped by scrolling down to the book link, but then again it might interest NIH too...

I know, I promised a long detailed snarky post about failed electioneering this week. I have not had time to finish it. I have about 80% of it on the laptop I call the Sickly Snail, from its very best operating speed because somebody "updated the browser" so many times that nothing but Opera from 1992 works any more, and 20% on the laptop I'm using now. The most efficient way to use the Snail is to type drafts into it and then retype them onto a computer with more memory. I've not put them together because, after being around a college kid with mono last week, I've felt as if I had mono all over again, myself, this week.

This is ridiculous. In theory the Epstein-Barr virus isn't even airborne. Well, in practice, the Epstein-Barr virus lies dormant in most adults--nearly all adult humans are immune carriers of mono, which is one reason not to kiss teenagers, even if they beg, Judge Moore--and anything that lowers our immunity, like the repeated glyphosate spray poisoning episodes we've all had this year, can reactivate EBV. Adults can come down with mono and, if we do, it's likely to be nastier than it was when we were teenagers and might not even have noticed it being worse than our average "cold."

Does glyphosate cause mononucleosis? Duh. Of course not. But glyphosate interferes with the functions of the liver. One of the functions of the human liver is to hold those lurking Epstein-Barr virus particles where they can't do us any more harm. The repeated exposure to glyphosate vapors my neighborhood has endured this year could easily be what's keeping Joe College from recovering from mono, and might easily cause me to come down with it again, heavenforbidandfend.

I talked to J. College because I'm the one who had acute mono for most of two years when I hadn't even kissed anybody. I was in Michigan. Where I had the mandatory MMR vaccine because, at the time, tests had not been invented yet to confirm that, like most baby-boomers, I hadn't even seen the doctor when those trivial "childhood diseases" were going around. I just enjoyed the quarantines...and that of course is why I say that if measles, mumps, or rubella, or all three, were risks of a vaccine against mononucleosis I'd recommend that everyone have that vaccine, but when "chronic" mononucleosis is a risk of the MMR vaccine...well...actually that was only a few batches of vaccine a long time ago, but we should be very, very careful about vaccines against trivial infections. Get immunized against diseases that actually kill people, if you're likely to be exposed to them, by all means.

Anyway, time for a little refresher course in mono awareness: Mononucleosis or glandular fever is a minor infection to which human resistance tends to be age-related. People who are infected as children usually don't notice it, nor do their parents. People who are infected in their teens or early twenties usually notice it as a persistent or recurrent "cold" accompanied by swollen lymph nodes, which may make your throat and neck feel sorer or stiffer than usual. People who are infected after age 30 are immune-compromised, so all kinds of infections can dogpile on them and they can die, usually of pneumonia, but mononucleosis by itself never killed anybody. It becomes serious only when, and because, you feel all strong and healthy and full of energy again around the time your immune system has only halfway beaten the virus, so you do something energetic and fun, take a long walk, play a game, do the sort of job normally offered to guys this age, and down you go again, and there goes another whole school term...

I forgot everything I'd learned about mitosis on one exam. I forgot to go to another exam. That teacher gave me a C for Compassion anyway, but in view of the rest of my grades I didn't want a transcript. After flunking out of university I'd look at a paper I'd written in college and think "What's this about, and who wrote it?" You're not yourself when you have mono, even when you think you are.

Mono has no symptoms that look dramatic to anyone else, or even feel as if they ought to be all that life-changing to you, but it is indeed a time-out on your life. Your best chance is to take that time-out, do only moderate amounts of moderate exercise and then take all the rest your body needs, and fight that urge to go back to work the same way you'd fight an urge to smash your little sister's nose. Mono is real, it's more boring than those who had it as children can imagine, and it is temporary. After easing slowly back into school and work you will eventually be as strong and as smart as you ever were, and resume growing up.

Apart, of course, from complications that may be identified if we-as-a-society continue unofficially testing the effects of glyphosate on kids with mononucleosis...

And, was "chronic" mono, as survived by the so-called Michigan Group of EBV/CFS/ME/ABCDEFG survivors, really a different and nastier strain of Epstein-Barr virus than people normally get? All I know is, my symptoms most definitely were complicated by inflammation of the liver, a.k.a. viral hepatitis; I've never paid for a test to pin a letter on the virus, but I have been assured that that's a separate virus that may or may not have been in the same batch of contaminated vaccine. Which is why I drink coffee through a straw. I don't want any other customers at the cafe to think "Eww ick, lips that had mononucleosis in Michigan might have touched this cup." They sanitize all the cups, but in the cafe my lips never touch a cup anyway.

Time for a book link? Here's a first book, written for grades four up, about mononucleosis...I apologize for sharing a first book. There are a lot of newer books purporting to be written for grown-ups, by doctors, on Amazon; I've not read any of them and can't pick one for you.

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10/

2. How NIH Did Something Right, Then Cancelled It By Doing Something Wrong

In 2013, the National Institute of Health did something very good for the American public: They posted a detailed explanation of how and why glyphosate does affect celiacs in the same ways natural wheat gluten does, only moreso, and why continued exposure to glyphosate can potentially cause, in some cases, more life-threatening conditions resulting from chronic loss of blood, chronic inability to absorb nutrients from food, chronic immune compromise, etc.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

This article was very thoroughly researched, and insofar as it describes the actual experience of celiacs it's right on. There is no valid reason why it's not among those EPA documents linked here:

https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html

According to the EPA's e-mail earlier this week, although the official comment period was last spring, it should still be possible to post comments on those documents, individually or together. I will continue printing them out as an anthology for offline readers, but I urge online readers in the United States to use the EPA website for the most immediate results. Foreign online readers may request copies by e-mail. As far as I'm concerned, this collection totally supersedes the earlier samizdat document circulated as "The Monsanto Papers." Yes, apart from the NIH article, it consists of documents Monsanto commissioned in defense of its glyphosate product "Roundup"--and there's nothing my inner prosecuting attorney loves better than when somebody's self-defense ends up making the best case against them.

Yes, a lot of people hated Monsanto for a long time, probably about as long as the corporation has existed, for good and sufficient reason. Yes, I've been part of various boycotts at various times in my lifetime. No, this has not, in my case, meant that I just hate everything the company does. Companies are made up of working people who change jobs. Monsanto was briefly managed by a chap who convinced me and a lot of people that he was a decent human being--too decent to stay there long--and it could, at any time, have been reorganized by a lot of new stockholders and managers who were decent human beings, into a corporation no worse than, e.g., Eastman. Monsanto used, while it made acrylic yarn, to make some of the best acrylic yarn on Earth, and I would have been delighted to have had any further reason to stop hating the company. And glyphosate is of course the generic name for the chemical; other companies make other glyphosate-based formulas that are just as bad for celiacs as "Roundup" is, although each brand of poison contains different additives that may aggravate the damage it does to people with various other genetic sensitivities. (Studies about that are only beginning.)

Everybody and their dog--and especially people who live with dogs, or rear fish, or eat anything pollinated by bees!--should read that 2013 study posted at the NIH site. It documents that during glyphosate pollution episodes not only some non-celiac humans but some animals, including fish and insects, develop gastrointestinal symptoms that mimic celiac sprue. It discusses the role of glyphosate in genetic thyroid conditions that are separate from, but associated with, the celiac gene. (Celiac thyroid failure is found in different ethnic groups than Hashimoto's Disease but the symptoms, and the things individuals can do to help themselves, are almost identical.) It documents how glyphosate reactions must inevitably contribute to cancer:

"Chronic inflammation, such as occurs in celiac disease, is a major source of oxidative stress, and is estimated to account for 1/3 of all cancer cases worldwide (Ames et al., 1993; Coussens & Werb, 2002)."

Note the 271 endnotes. Whatever else time might have revealed about any flaws in Samsei's and Seneff's research, nobody can claim that it wasn't thorough.

I do find one thing in the S&S document that puzzles me. I'm not sure whether it's a false connection, or another ethnically specific reaction. In the United States, no solid correlation between prenatal glyphosate exposure and birth defects has been found. In geographically separate parts of South America and Europe, sudden outbreaks of birth defects have been found in correlation with prenatal glyphosate exposure. It would be interesting if there were an ethically tolerable way to pinpoint scientifically whether this has something to do with a genetic pattern that developed in the Pyrenees, since it's found in people of French and Spanish descent, or with some other pollutant or drug that was used by the mothers of the defective babies. As with the correlation between glyphosate and sprue, birth defects in animals have been associated with glyphosate only in some places...This is scientifically interesting, but nobody should be allowed to practice science in the absence of an ethical reaction that immediately suppresses all thoughts about scientific experimentation.

After the publication of this document, a corporation run by decent human beings would have recognized the following fact: Amoral though corporations are, continuing to produce glyphosate would be corporate suicide if and when these facts became generally known. The only sane course of action open to Monsanto or other "pesticide" producers would have been to put their chemists to work destroying all existing supplies of glyphosate before another molecule of the stuff left the factories.

Instead, Monsanto and other corporations made the criminally insane decision to participate in reckless endangerment by continuing to expose everyone to a poison that, according to Monsanto's very own self-defense, harms a majority of all test subjects in every species--fish, fowl, insect, or mammal--only in so many different ways that almost every individual seems to have a different reaction first.

In 2013, most farmers weren't spraying glyphosate directly on most food, and I personally was noticing only occasional reactions I assumed had been caused by wheat flour having drifted into something in a kitchen somewhere. Celiacs who were concerned about "losing the ability to digest other foods as well, after going gluten-free" were miserable, but they were still buying products purported to relieve their misery. The corporations could have stopped marketing glyphosate immediately and covered their back ends. As we know, they chose instead to continue encouraging farmers to use glyphosate not only as an herbicide but as a food preservative. No food is now safe for celiacs to eat. Even organically grown food can be exposed to vapors that drift in on the wind and, in the United States, so-called "organic certification" agencies have sold out and allowed "organic" farmers to use glyphosate and other selected poisons, as long as they pay their membership fees...while serious organic farmers who can't afford the fees remain uncertified.

The strong form of the celiac genetic pattern, which allows people to develop celiac sprue (only after middle age, before glyphosate poisoning became common), is estimated to occur in about one out of ten thousand people of Irish descent. Though found in Britain, Iceland, the United States, and other places to which Irish people emigrated, it's a very rare disease; it proves your connection not only to Ireland but to specific families in Ireland. Any scientific study of celiacs must, because of the rareness of the celiac gene, be considered statistically separate from any scientific study of the general human population.

A weaker form of the pattern, which produces (usually unsuspected) gluten sensitivity and susceptibility to various intractable chronic diseases, is much more common. That has been estimated to occur in one out of every four or five White people (probably overestimated in studies that occurred after glyphosate was widely used on wheat), and has been found in "pure" Black people in Africa. In people of Irish descent, if not the majority genetic pattern, it's certainly a solid minority. Those people are not true celiacs but five'll get you ten that they are the people whose glyphosate reactions mimic celiac sprue. It would be interesting to know to what extent they are the people whose relatives developed schizophrenia during the potato famine, when the only thing left for poor people in Ireland to eat was wheat...

Because celiacs are born swimming against the tide, defying the odds, working twice as hard as other people do to accomplish the same things, healthy celiacs are very "strong" people when we go gluten-free. We've over-trained. A normal healthy woman is considered fit and strong if she can lift her own weight. I can both lift and carry 10 to 15% more than my own weight; I carried my husband through the house when he was ill; I've lifted patients who were bigger than he was. A normal healthy man is considered fit and strong if he can walk thirty miles in a day. I think nothing of walking thirty miles, except that it will take up most of the day, and I would not intentionally have set out to walk 25 miles in 20-degree weather in canvas shoes. Yes, when we're healthy, celiacs are tough as nails and not to be trifled with...is that why a lot of envious wimps in these chemical corporations went ahead with a plan to kill us all, outright, by slow torture?

The outcry against this program of IRISH GENOCIDE was delayed by the fact that food processors are not required to identify the "pesticide" residues that can make otherwise healthy food indigestible or positively poisonous to those who eat it. Most people didn't know or care that farmers were spraying poison right on freshly shelled, "healthy," nuts and seeds, or on fruits that don't even have a noticeable "peel." As a result most of us had no idea why we were having celiac sprue as a reaction to gluten-free food, while many of us weren't even celiacs.

But meanwhile, while working to conceal the truth about glyphosate, the corporations even paid shills to publish this abomination, which is still online at NIH and is still being used as if it refuted Samsei's and Seneff's indisputable facts, which it does not:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5705608/

Because only a few people are celiacs who have immediate, indisputable celiac reactions to even low levels of glyphosate, Mesnage and Antoniou would lead us to believe, we as a species can afford to wait for statistical proof that glyphosate will produce all those other long-term effects associated with chronic untreated celiac sprue?

The appropriate response for the U.S. federal government would be to find Mesnage, Antoniou, and their assistants, lock them in a lead-lined cell, and forcibly feed them "Roundup" through nasal drip tubes, so that appropriately shielded chemical analysts could identify exactly which of the horrific consequences of high doses of glyphosate was the immediate cause of each death. With in-cell TV cameras so the rest of the world could see which ones gushed blood, howled in pain, gagged, convulsed, became paralyzed, or just lapsed into narcoleptic comas from kidney failure. Though small in scale, this statistical study would be very valuable to the true scientific mind!

Oh, and don't forget the skin lesions...that hospital study submitted to the EPA mentioned that almost one-third of people whose glyphosate reactions sent them to hospital emergency rooms had, primarily, skin lesions. Nasal drip feeding would put most of the lesions inside Mesnage's, Antoniou's, and their accessories' bodies, but I'm sure anyone feeling the surge of sadistic rage that I get by way of a prodrome to a celiac reaction would enjoy seeing photos of the dissected bodies. I'm sure I've already seen similar...inside the mouths and around the back ends of animals who were having a now common, though formerly rare, kind of "feline enteritis," which vets now admit is a symptom of a herpes-type virus that didn't use to produce symptoms in most cats.

(All the Patchnose Family are survivors of "feline enteritis." Funnily enough, at Cat Sanctuaries closer to roads or railroads that have been sprayed more often, I'm told the condition has become chronic in their cats. Funnier still, pet care books published before 1990 didn't even discuss this messy, sometimes fatal, flea-borne infection...which seems to be exacerbated by glyphosate exposure in pet food and airborne vapor drift...)

Breathes there a baby-boomer who can't sing along, who is not already hearing the song replaying in our mind's ears:

"How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?"

Why should I share my LP when you can hear the song on Amazon? I like this group a lot better than Bob Dylan.

When a substance has as many harmful effects on humans as we all now know, beyond all doubt, glyphosate does have, anybody who continues to babble about statistics needs to be in a locked cell for life. I say nothing about feeding them.

Nevertheless, this stupid quibble about the fact that Samsei and Seneff did spell out the ways glyphosate can enable non-celiacs to share the horrors that nature intended even celiacs to be able to avoid, toward the ends of our lives--this idiotic attempt to defend the use of glyphosate was allowed to appear on the NIH web site, and to keep Samsei's and Seneff's valuable study out of the EPA dossier.

I propose a change of policy, for NIH, that will be healthier for humankind. Consider celiacs as a valuable national resource, the canaries in the coal mine. Let every new product proposed for addition to the food supply be tested by a panel of 25 celiacs, each to be compensated, say, $1000, and none to be asked to serve twice in five years--which would limit the number of new chemical additives in the food supply, which would be a good thing. If one celiac reacts to the new product, destroy all existing supplies of the product, pay each celiac, say, $1,000,000, and publish the formula as a warning against future experiments.

Whether there is another product that can harm as many people in as many different ways as glyphosate does may never be known--and should never be known. Experimentation should be curbed by the mere awareness that it might be possible to find out.

3. What Readers Can Do

Readers who use Twitter, I think it would be appropriate, and easy to type, if you just retweet this post, typing in just these three explanatory keywords: "@NIH," "@EPA," and "#Shame." The more retweets, the better. 

Retweet this post if you are getting older, if you have ever considered the possibility that younger people may need to help you look after your physical needs, y'know, like driving and reading and stuff, and you have considered the younger people in your neighborhood and wondered whether any of them is going to be stronger than you are when they are thirty or forty years old, and you are even seventy. 

(I say seventy because, for many people, that age is the beginning of "old." For non-celiacs on both sides of my family, ninety is the beginning of "old." For celiacs on Mother's Irish side, "old" can start at twenty--and we don't even have the schizophrenic pattern; we know exactly what we're going through, all the way.)


Retweet this post if you are, or know, a "Spoonie"--someone living with a chronic, incurable, probably not very visible, disease condition. Before they became an online community and chose that name for themselves, Spoonies were also known as sickies, hypochondriacs, wimps, and various other things; the one I used for myself as a young undiagnosed celiac was "Weepy Weed." (I called myself the Weepy Weed. I didn't anticipate that there'd be a community of us.) Spoonies call themselves that because of a long-ago blog post in which someone illustrated their day-to-day life in terms of taking one or two spoons out of a basket to represent each drain on their energy, and then said that the thing was that they never know at the beginning of the day how many spoons are in the basket. When we get glyphosate and similar poisons banned, some people will still be Spoonies, but all the Spoonies are going to have a lot more spoons.

Retweet this post if you remember having mononucleosis in high school or college, and don't want to have it again.

There are "leftist" and "rightist" approaches to getting glyphosate out of the food supply. I say we need both, and let whichever works faster win.

Maybe the electioneering post should have been about asking candidates how fast they can stop this Irish Genocide.

Dear EPA...

After yesterday's Glyphosate Awareness chat, I commented on a page on the EPA web site to which someone linked:

"
Don't you think the glyphosate fact sheet should mention that glyphosate causes painful and life-threatening reactions in celiacs? NIH link:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

After 20 years as models of healthy living with the celiac gene, my mother and I are once again having symptoms out of control due to airborne vapors and contaminated foods. As I type this comment I'm having a reaction that would cause a non-celiac to take a sick day and probably rush to the hospital, but as a celiac I already know that it's just another contaminated food product I ate. I know people whose reactions were already disabling; I know someone who died during his (non-celiac) glyphosate reaction (narcolepsy) last summer.

Isn't it time to admit that this chemical is building up to levels that produce at least MODERATE toxicity? And even if it's making only a few people sick (which is not the case--it makes most test subjects sick, but only a few in each group *in the same way*)...how many people is it all right to harm?
"

In this morning's e-mail, I received an unsigned form letter full of links to a lot of other sites. This is the problem with a big, clunky federal government, and the reason why we need to downsize that government. I've believed for a long time that a really effective way to address government waste would be to hold each government employee personally accountable to each taxpayer who brings a problem to the attention of a government agency. If the employee scans for keywords and starts spewing random "referrals," which as U.S. taxpayers know often include referrals to offices that closed three years ago, that is an unnecessary employee who needs to get out of Washington permanently. If the employee honestly thinks someone else needs to be consulted, the employee should be required to find that person, make a proper introduction, and repeat what the taxpayer told the employee before being allowed to get back to the computer game the employee had been playing.

My reply:

"
Taxpayers are not tennis balls. You must get a grip on that tendency to respond to every comment/question by "referring" people to someone, anyone else, just so you can get back to whatever you were doing before. Individual government employees need to take responsibility for things like updating the glyphosate information page to reflect the fact that NIH has published, long ago, the proof that glyphosate causes nasty reactions in all people who do have the celiac gene. (It also causes bizarrely celiac-like reactions in many people who do not have the gene.)

For what it's worth, I downloaded the documents from the EPA site in March. I read them before posting a comment on them then. On the same day I also blogged about them ( https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html ), and have been publicizing them ever since. I'm just not sure why the NIH page was omitted since it confirms that not only does glyphosate cause some unpleasant reaction or other, with lots of individual variation, across all species studied, but it specifically targets Irish-Americans (since the strong form of the celiac gene is pretty much limited to people of Irish descent).

I'm also not sure how it was possible, even for that guy who resigned from the job, to let corporate interests focus on the relatively low incidence of each individual, genetically determined reaction, from the 8 classes of glyphosate reactions identified in humans by hospital emergency care staff--rather than the main fact these documents prove, which is that glyphosate is harmful to almost everybody, but in different ways and degrees.

You, individually, whoever you are, need to protect yourself against long-term guilt reactions by taking action on this issue and others like it.

Toward that end, I urge you to answer this question individually: How many of your neighbors or customers is it acceptable to harm?

You don't need to e-mail the answer to me; I'm not your spiritual counsellor. You need to reconsider the level of warning about glyphosate safety to ensure that no glyphosate reaches food or drinking water supplies, since continuing to allow glyphosate to be used in the current reckless manner amounts to "Irish Genocide."
"

Why am I posting this, Gentle Readers? To encourage youall to bombard the EPA with your own comments and questions. If you get form letters full of links, go ahead and use those links, if usable, to bombard other government offices. And, meanwhile, publicize the inefficiency of the federal government and the need to manage things like glyphosate on the local level. City government, along with business owners, home owners, schools, and offices, need to be the ones making the decision within hours, not years: "There are people of Irish descent in this town/city/county, therefore nobody has a right even to paint liquid glyphosate on individual plants, which is a compromise that might reasonably be allowed with some 'pesticides' in some situations."

Whatever individuals' reactions to glyphosate may be, nobody should be allowed to inflict those reactions on the same person twice.

The Exemplary Churchmanship of Robert E. Lee

People were batting this topic around on Twitter. "Far from being kind and heroic, General Lee was regarded as an especially brutal slaveholder even by other slaveholders!"

Say whaaat? I said, as I hope any Virginian, however young, would still say. We all know that, while making military service a career at all is morally questionable, and transferring from the U.S. to the Confederate army was imprudent, and even if we concede that it was ethically right to fight in defense of Virginia, the way Lee sacrificed the other two-thirds of Virginia to his own corner is debatable. At best the General is remembered for having made a bad decision based on emotion, and stood by it, and played out the role he'd chosen with admirable fortitude and integrity. But apart from that, we all learned at school, the worst accusation Lee's enemies could make about his character was that as a church member he made a wisecrack about a church controversy that came to sound like a dirty joke. It was a joke about church matters, which was bad enough in those days, but it wasn't dirty at the time. Even before The War, General Lee was part of Virginia's peculiarly blessed and peculiarly awkward landed-poor class, which is why that detail was considered worth notice: the landed poor must never act trashy, as in cracking a dirty joke about a church controversy.

In reply, a Northern apologist shared this link. Read it, fellow Virginians. Though the author is obviously playing picador, read his charges and see if you agree with me on what makes this article credible...and appalling:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

What's new about Adam Serwer's perspective is that he seems to imagine that these accusations are as new to everyone else as they seem to be to some Yankee readers. They're not new. Recent biographies have tried to skim lightly over this type of thing...

http://fair-use.org/national-anti-slavery-standard/1866/04/14/robert-e-lee-his-brutality-to-his-slaves

In fact, if you've read any substantial amount of nineteenth century American history this discussion of Lee as slaveholder seems a bit like a pious vegan emoting over the details about how "...they not only drank milk, but they ate beef! And some of them even ate...HAM!"

General Lee was not regarded as especially brutal by very many other slaveholders, nor were his views on the benefits of being enslaved to Christians peculiar to slaveholders, to the few who still argued in favor of slavery by 1850, or to White people. (Slavery itself was legal in Africa, and many enslaved people went quietly and even tried to do good work--as long as they believed they would be able to earn their freedom and come home with money, perhaps with wives/husbands and children, and other benefits legal slavery had had in almost every country except the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.)

In claiming that slavery was doing slaveholders more harm (economically) than slaves, Lee was singing along with a considerable choir. Pro-slavery arguments like John C. Calhoun's came from a different generation; General Lee's generation had lived to see just how mistaken Vice-President Calhoun's views had been.

In being wary of slaves' family ties, and breaking up families, Lee might have been less humane than some of his friends but was thereby in the mainstream of his culture.

And when slaves tried to escape, terrorism is the only word for what became standard U.S. practice. Merely tearing off the slave's shirt (he or she might or might not have another shirt that year) and ordering the biggest, meanest man who could be found to take a whip and "lay it on" was normal; washing the crushed, bleeding wounds with salt brine or alcohol was a semi-humane touch a really brutal slaveholder would have withheld; leaving the wounds to be nibbled by vermin, and the slave to die of infections, was one of the tortures the cruel slaveholders were allowed to use. There were others. Those who pressed the matter found that in some times and places there was no actual law against killing a slave outright. In fact there was an unofficial incentive, as the number of slaves exceeded the number of jobs slaves could be trusted to do.

The practice of slavery was the subject of many books in the early nineteenth century. Most went out of print because the best of these books are disgusting to read. Here's one that fits well into the totalitarian undercurrent that's always been rejected by most Americans, but has run through royalism, capital-C Communism, fascism, and modern big-government philosophy ("statism" or socialism):

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10

Or consider this testimony from a genteel Southern Lady, showing the extent to which she was able to avoid seeing things considered too disgusting for her to bear:

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10

I've found others, while browsing in academic libraries; at the time I felt no desire to buy the books or note the references. You can probably find plenty of material about the "patrollers" and "passes" and regulation of slave churches and so on, if you go to a university library and browse the history section for this period. It won't be fun reading. The simple fact was that slavery as practiced in the United States served the Highest Good of very few people (although Phillis Wheatley may have been one) and didn't even serve the selfish short-term interests of many people. It was foul and filthy and not even profitable. The scramble to fix slavery was not unlike the current scramble to fix Obamacare. "This whole issue is ethically unacceptable if you insist on thinking about it, but since thinking about it would cost me money, let's try not to think about the ethics but just try to save the part that seems to work, in some short-term way, for me!"

So, yes: General Lee was a respectable gentleman you would probably have admired, trusted, even liked if you'd known him personally, and he also did things that turn your stomach, because those were things respectable gentlemen did back then. And if you or I had lived at that time, those things would have been part of our definition of "normal." If we'd been lower-class Whites we would have admired the courtesy of landed-poor-perceived-as-rich Whites whose contempt for us was at least refined enough to be considered subtle, and if we'd been Black we would probably have agreed that runaway slaves could expect a good whipping and ought to be grateful to have their wounds excoriated with salt (which reduced the risk of death from infection); and if we'd been rich Whites we would probably have tsk-tsked about what a pity it was that such a fine couple as the Lees were so much less wealthy than most of their social peer group, and if we'd been in the landed poor class we would probably have agreed that, whatever else they did, the Lees were a good role model for the rest of us. Those were things normal human beings did back then.

I wonder which of the normal everyday things we do will seem barbaric and indefensible to the sixth generation after us, if humanity survives for so long?

Status Update: Those. Days.

A young person, not one of my Nephews, is having One of Those Days today.

I am too. We still don't know whether it's a reaction to continual glyphosate exposure in the area, as the road workers seem hellbent on using up all of their existing supply on Scott County for the express purpose of killing me, or a virus going around. Suffice it to say the teenager's whole family were draggy all week, the teenager's cat is in the veterinary hospital as well, the teenager has been having relapses of mononucleosis for some time but recently started fainting and vomiting, and the teenager's doctor wants to run some special expensive tests nobody can afford...and me?

I woke up this morning feeling draggy. Well, it was a dark dreary morning, hardly daylight by 8:15 when the car pool came by. It was raining.

I was still working on a document on the pathetic little old laptop I call the Sickly Snail. It used to have Microsoft Office, but due to "updates" it no longer has enough memory to run Office, so it runs something called OpenOffice.org. You do not want Open Office on your computer. For one thing it takes a lot of time and trouble to get your documents to look proper, the way they do in Word. For another thing, after you've gone to that time and trouble, the company manages to send out little "updates"--even when you're not online--that restore the settings that make your nice printable documents look like e-mail or something, all over again.

Remember those old 1980s jokes about a Cursor being someone whose computer is full of Bugs, and Boot being what a Cursor is likely to do on finding a Bug in the system, and Windows are what you hope the Cursor does not Boot the computer through...?

Open Office is free to download, but it attacks you with these horrible updates that force you to turn off the automatic "correction" of people's names into words that look a bit like them, and turn on the correction of "straight quotes," and restore Times Roman as the default font, and all of those things, all over again, and over, and over. Sometimes as it might be just before breakfast, when you were close to having a document ready to upload and post.

And what the BLINKING BLEEP is making it even possible for this attack to take place when the computer is miles away from a modem or a wireless connection? Who is spying on my little Snail? 

We need FCC protection from this kind of thing. I don't have the Internet in my home. I don't even have a land phone in my home. No "smart" device that connects to the Internet should be able to start in my home. My home is being violated! Whoever is connecting to the Snail, I suspect the telephone company, should have to snip up every wire, smash everything with a microchip in it, have their electrical wires yanked out of the walls, have wherever they are permanently disconnected from so much as an electric light bulb for the rest of their lives, and have to pay me a couple million dollars for SPYING AND HARASSMENT!

Also OpenOffice.org should be required to guarantee that, if allowed to "update" the security codes for their software, they must do so without changing any of The Owner's settings. All computer owners' names, as far as they're concerned, are The Owner, and when The Owner is using the computer they must not touch it, and if The Owner allows it to connect to the Internet OpenOffice can send its "updates" programmed to self-install after the computer is turned off, but one little tweak to The Owner's settings should cost OpenOffice.org serious money for wasting The Owner's times. Open a new document, see ragged right-hand margins, collect $500!

Anyway I was in the process of cleaning up this nasty mess OpenOffice somehow managed to dump on the poor li'l Snail when the car pool arrived, and I grabbed a dress out of the closet, and it had lost a crucial button in the wash, so instead of looking for another outfit in the closet I just threw on what I'd yanked off last night, and the car pool were grumpy too. Probably having the same reaction I was. And if anybody imagines I wore this dress overnight at some man's house, they should pity that man, whoever they imagine him to be.

For a monogamous middle-aged lady whose Significant Other has become "old" due to Lyme Disease, and who can hardly wait to see how much "youth" he recovers when we get glyphosate banned, I do seem to figure in a lot of local baby-boomers' fantasies about what they think they'd do if they still had black hair and straight backs. Some of them have pretty weird fantasies, too.

So then I opened my e-mail and got some bad news, and halfway through reading it had to bolt to the bathroom with celiac sprue. By this time my coffee had cooled down enough to be sipped. Maybe caffeine would give me a little energy. It did give my body a little energy. What my body did with that energy was to start to feel feverish.

Earlier this morning I'd been working on the long-promised post about how the Democrats are preparing to throw this election away, by failing to have any real platform except WE HATE TRUMP AND ALL OTHER REPUBLICANS BECAUSE THEY ARE NASTY PEOPLE, which is just the thing to tell a bipartisan swing voter to be sure to vote for any and all Republicans within range. Some R's are nasty people, but it's not as if some D's weren't...oh why even go there?

I am not "red," although some other people at this web site are. I am not "blue." My party color, if I had one, would be green--True Green, not Poison Green, which unfortunately describes the leaders of the so-called Green Party. Humans are political animals but our whole polis is sick these days.

I needed to turn off these uncheering thoughts and get on with a paid post about a business that has an odd, misleading name. I looked at their web page. I could not think of anything to say about them. I kept thinking about how the D's have become the party of violent haters these days, while the party of a Bankruptcy Billionnaire who has never been even "red," but always orange...

Why, I thought, shuffling back to the bathroom for another round of celiac sprue, which is mostly messy and embarrassing but not exactly painless either...why was I born? Why do I live? When do I get to die? The sooner the better. I feel too tired to live...

Rational adults don't entertain thoughts like that for very long, but we do have them. We have just lived long enough to recognize them as what they are, which is symptoms. If persistent they might be diagnosed as a mental illness. They are more or less typical of mononucleosis, which most adults have had. They go with the soreness in the not yet swollen nodes I'm also feeling right now.

Yes, young people, adults do have Those Days.

Some days are diamond, John Denver sang, and some days are stone, and some days are just plain raw sewage and there's no doing anything about it.

I do not want to join the simpering chorus of morons telling you to paste on a fake smile, on days like this. I recommend, if you do feel a fake smile coming on, on a day like this, that you slap your face good and hard and admit: "No, I'm not 'fine.' I may be coming down with something. Stay away from me."

I also recommend that, as a point of legal policy, our society should offer no redress for anybody who is stupid enough not to hear that and immediately back away, saying, "Sorry I bothered you hope you feel better soon" as they back. You don't have the energy to do anything violent, but you should have a perfect legal right to spit in their faces, call them formerly unprintable names, and wish them a fatal case of whatever you've got, if you feel like that.

The good news is that after living through a certain number of this kind of days and learning that they do pass, we do learn to stop taking them seriously. They're symptoms. They're part of an immune system overreaction that goes with mononucleosis. When you know this you do develop an ability to laugh at this 0kind of mood.

Laughing helps it dry out and blow away faster.

So, if the teenager with mono sees me laughing today...no, Junior, I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at mono, which I had off and on for most of two years, which was less bad than some of the Michigan Group of ME/EBV/CFS/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP or whatever people wanted to call the kind of mononucleosis-aggravated-by-hepatitis we got from a certain batch of MMR vaccine while in Michigan. It was definitely more unpleasant than measles, mumps, and rubella together. It was good, or bad, for many of Those Days.

Eventually you do build up some immunity and feel normal and chipper again, most of the time. Years go by in between reruns of Those Days and, when you do come to one, you laugh.

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/15

Congratulations, Walter Block

While the cover of his infamous 1976 book was enough to convince me that Professor Walter Block has tried to defend the undefendable...Check it out: Amazon's actually refusing to show the original cover, with the subtitle, which contained a four-letter word for a very disgusting category of humans.

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/15/

...Nevertheless, his successful career proves that letting people hate you is not necessarily a bad thing for a writer. Thanks to Tom Woods for sharing this update.

"

Walter Block, the prolific libertarian theorist, Austrian economist, and professor at Loyola University New Orleans, reached an unbelievable milestone the other day: 100 peer-reviewed articles published that he co-authored with his undergraduate students.

Now 100 peer-reviewed articles is four times as many as most Loyola professors can boast in their entire careers, much less just with students.

No other professor has come close to matching this feat. I don't think any other professor has even tried.

This is amazing, right? The university must be so proud! Where else can parents find a professor so committed to his students' long-term success?

Nope.

So far, not a peep from Loyola University.

This, no doubt, is because Walter is a "sexist" for not believing in the gender wage gap, and because he "supports slavery" (yes, people really are this dumb) because the New York Times took him out of context.

Can you imagine Walter, who actually favors reparations for slavery, "supporting slavery"? His point was that the objectionable part about slavery was the coercive aspect, and that everything else was incidental. The Times, which wanted to make Rand Paul (whose family has long known Walter) look bad, twisted this to make it sound as if Walter was saying that some aspects of slavery might be nice.

A decent human being running Loyola University would have admonished the Times for its libelous reporting and defended his extremely accomplished and widely published professor. But that's only for leftists. Anyone who isn't p.c. will be abandoned at the first opportunity, and sternly lectured for views everyone on Earth knows he doesn't hold and would never hold.

Meanwhile, lots of Loyola students refuse to take Walter's classes because of the buzzwords: why, we've heard he's a "racist" and a "sexist"!

Here's a guy who gets articles published for them in academic journals, who cares more about them than any professor they'll ever meet, and who even got some articles published that he disagreed with!

He is, in short, the model professor.

It is shameful how he has been treated.

Now Walter doesn't have his own podcast, but he does have friends -- lots of them. And some of those friends, like me, have podcasts. And you'd better believe I used my podcast to get the word out about Walter's amazing milestone. Libertarian blogs all over the place are doing likewise.

"

I don't do this often but, having ganked his fun facts, I'll share TW's business link:

http://www.happyearner.com/ijustdiditforyou